


A day in Bastogne

by Sangaride



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: F/M, kind of sappy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-25
Updated: 2015-09-25
Packaged: 2018-04-23 08:55:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4870849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sangaride/pseuds/Sangaride
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amid the wounded, Eugene and Renée found a little time for sentimentality.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A day in Bastogne

Mornings at Bastogne meant waking up to see more trees taken down by artillery. Another day, another hell. The sun bathed the Easy Company men with its gentle light although it still didn’t want to warm them. All of Roe’s body was hurting. He shifted in his foxhole to straighten his aching back. He looked around. It was the same identical trees stretching out to the horizon, the same snow coating this nightmarish wood with purity. But the sunlight was really soft this morning.

Liebgott was already bawling a song a few foxholes away and an officer was already yelling him to shut the fuck up. Liebgott toned down, his resentful expression clear in Roe’s mind, and the vigorous singing faded into the forest silence. A few calm steps on the snow. Roe twisted his neck to see who was coming from behind him. From the corner of his eyes he managed to catch Babe Heffron’s figure – actually, all he could catch was Babe’s hair shining red with the sun.

Babe kept walking until he was standing right next to Roe.

“Good morning, doc” Babe said, eyes lost on the enemy lines spreading ahead.

“Good morning to you too, Heffron” Roe greeted him back. His voice was so low it was almost a whisper.

Babe shook his head. “What a shitty day to die,” he blurted out.

“Mmh.”

It was Roe’s job, keeping the men alive. His and the officer’s. But since Easy Company settled down in bois Jacques, Roe’s job had been more and more like flogging a dead horse. Men were dropping like flies. Those who were still alive were badly wounded or pissing needles or whatever else. Everybody had to make do with the burden their body had become.

Roe’s incapacity to help them weighted him down somewhere between the stomach and the pancreas. All he could do was admit there was no miracle medicine for their problem, just common sense advices. All he could do was keeping the blood from pouring out too much till the wounded men were brought to Bastogne, where the mix of despair and exasperation in Renée’s eyes was the most meaningful confession of their inability to save men who needed them.

“Do you still have chocolate?” Babe asked.

Roe dug in his chest pocket, “I think…” His numb fingers found the remaining squares of the chocolate bar he had offered Babe the other day. “That’s all I have,” he said, his arm reaching out to Babe as the other man crouched to take the bar.

“Thanks, doc,” he said, peeling off the shreds of the wrapping. “Did you eat some?” he asked, crunching fiercely the chocolate.

His head jerked back. “Holy fuck!” he exclaimed. “It’s frozen!” His mouth twisted in disgust. “How long do I have to suck it to make it melt?” He was eyeing the guilty bar in his hand. However, without hesitation and despise the disgust still visible on his face, he shoved two squares in his mouth and began chewing.

“Hey doc!” Roe looked up. Babe cast him the last squares. “For your other patients!” 

A bomb exploded. “Remember to brush your teeth, Edward,” Roe reminded him sternly. Babe snickered and ran to where he could hear Vittore yell “Babe, whatever you are doing, I need you HERE!!” 

 

The jeep hurried through the forest, following a muddy path tires had already traced on the snow. O’Brian was bouncing on the hood and Roe was trying his best to keep him still while maintaining pressure on the wound.

They reached Bastogne quickly. When the driver stopped the jeep in front of the church, O’Brian was still breathing, woozy, head lolling, but alive. Roe jumped off the jeep, requisitioned a liaison officer to help bring the kid inside and together they stepped into this reenactment of hell the old building had become.

The smell of blood and ammoniac blew up in their face. Every little sound grew deafening with the church acoustic and the sight of piles of butchered flesh completed this cacophony of yells and quick steps.

“Bring him in there,” a doctor passing by ordered them.

Roe and the liaison officer complied. They brought O’Brian in a chapel on the right, where a man was yelling the dead awake, a bedsheet soaked in blood under him. Three nurses hastened to stop the hemorrhage. One of them, who saw Roe and the liaison officer come in, told them to lay O’Brian on the table behind. She turned around to examine him, quickly determined what needed to be done, ordered the two men to fetch plasma while looking for an artery and within a few long minutes, O’Brian was saved.  
“You just won your ticket home,” the liaison officer congratulated the still unconscious soldier before leaving.

Roe wiped the sweat off O’Brian’s face with a not-so-dirty cloth. He hadn’t believed the kid could make it. He stood back, observing how the kid’s breathing was pacing down. The table he was lying on was, in fact, an altar.

“Do you have extra bandages, extra anything?” he asked the nurse who was cleaning the table where the yelling man had been. Her lack of response prompted Roe to repeat in French.

“Allez voir dans la dépendance, ”she told him. “Ne prenez que le strict nécessaire, on est un peu juste ici aussi.”

Roe nodded and left the relative peace of the chapel. He assumed the dépendance was the little room Renée had led him in the first time he came here. He remembered easily where it was –it was a church, not a palace; and since there was nobody to tell him what to take and what to leave, he freely served himself. When done, he made his way to the exit, arms burdened with bandages, syringes and plasma.

 

Renée was held back by a soldier from L Company. He had ended up here with a broken arm and a foot crushed by a tree. He walked with a limp, wasn’t able to hold a rifle but he insisted on joining his friends back on the frontline. Renée wasn’t listening to the arguments he kept listing to convince her to let him go. He wasn’t in a fit state to fight, but he needn’t stay in a hospital. It was a waste of a bed, food and time.

“Fine,” she finally conceded. People needed her elsewhere. “You can leave. Just try to stay safe.”

Ignoring the “Mademoiselle, this is war!” the man retorted, she jogged to the entrance, where the newly arrived wounded were waiting for someone to take care of them. Roe was there.

“Eugène!” she called. “Eu-gene,” she corrected herself. Roe turned around.

“Bonjour,” he greeted her. Renée smiled. He looked so modest, his chin buried in his uniform, his arms barely holding the medic supplies together, his low voice and his odd accent.

“You are leaving,” Renée observed in French.

“The men need me.”

“Wait,” she said, her hand raised to touch his forearm. She turned to face the bustle of the improvised hospital. “Je fais une pause!” she shouted at a man guiding a stretcher on the other side of the aisle. The man looked up and raised his hand in agreement.

Renée exited the church with Roe following her steps.

They sat on a church bench that had been taken out. Renée took a chocolate bar out of her coat pocket. Roe was shaking his head before she could properly offer it to him.

Instead he watched. He watched the sweet wave of Renée’s jawline as she ate, how the line of her mouth tightened when she bit into another square of chocolate, how she gazed at the soldiers come and go, eyelashes adorning her eyes.

A quick look of her told him she knew he was staring. Roe looked away, his mouth resolutely closed. The cracks of the chocolate brought him back to Bayou Chene, when sweets were a treat to ease out a scratch. The brittle sound echoed in the gaping void Roe’s soul had become.

Renée suddenly spoke:

“We cannot do anything for the men,” she said. “They come here to die and we have to share their suffering for their remaining time.”

She added with a smile quick to fade: “With the number of soldiers you bring here, is there anyone left fighting on the frontline?” Roe’s mouth twitched. Silence fell.

After a while, Renée confessed: “Sitting here with you is more relaxing that actual sleep.” She had stopped eating. Nothing was left from the chocolate bar except for the wrapping on her lap. Without looking at it she grasped it and clenched her fist around it, making a faint crumpling escape.

Roe looked closely at her. Hesitantly, he covered her soiled-with-blood hand with his own. Renée accepted the gesture; her thumb began stroking Roe’s skin, so gently Roe could barely feel the touch.

War was a bad time for flirting; Easy company men were currently facing the enemy, Renée could be called to help at any time and he had to go back on the frontline to help Spina tend the men. The moment could go soon, so Roe bent his head awkwardly, his and Renée’s foreheads almost hitting. Renée’s lips shaped a “oh” that never left; Roe kissed her. She tightened her grasp on Roe’s hand.

They kissed until Renée’s name was called.

“That’s Anna,” she said, breaking away from Roe’s warmth and hurrying back into the church. Left alone in the cold, Roe gathered up the medic supplies and went looking for someone to drive him to Easy Company sector.

 

Renée later emerged from the darkness of the church into the darkness of the night. Faraway explosions were shining brighter than the stars. Tonight she was going home. She was going to recover her bed, instead of falling asleep in a corner between cold stones and Anna, curled up in a heavy stage of unconsciousness that was nothing like sleep. In the comfort of her home, she would not have to wake up, several times, to help, to listen to the cries of soldiers while her body was growing numb. She was walking down the church steps when a jeep hurtled on the square. Renée hurried towards it, body heavy but fast, ready to do her job.

“Eugene?”

Roe was there, jumping down the jeep with that preoccupied look he was always wearing. Two soldiers were trying to keep awake a man with his chest ripped opened. Roe hastened to help get the stretcher off the hood.  
“Eugène?” Renée asked again, the name unintentionally softer in her mouth.

He saw her. A gleam crossed his swollen eyes. “Renée?”

“Shrapnel hit him!” one of the soldiers shouted to the doctor and nurses that were rushing up to meet them.

“Shrapnel?” the second soldier repeated. “It was half a shell!”

“I’m walking home,” Renée told Roe.

“I will walk you home,” Roe immediately replied. “Just, wait,” he said as he ran to the soldier on the stretcher. Renée watched him disappear in the church, shouting “Stay up, stay up!” to the dying man. Roe came out not long after, less agitated.

“A surgeon is taking care of him,” he told Renée. She was waiting.

“You... you are going home?” he began in French.

“Yes,” Renée answered in a breath. Swinging her left foot, she carried on: “I have spent the whole week in the church; I haven’t seen my mom or my bed in a long time.”

Roe nodded. He let Renée lead him through the streets of Bastogne and soon, because Renée’s home wasn’t far from the church, their walk ended. 

“Here we are,” she said like an apology after climbing the front steps to her door.

“I need to go back on the frontline,” Roe said with sad eyes. He added, his tone coming out unexpectedly solemn: “I hope I will see you again.”

It surprised Renée.

“Yes, yes,” she laughed faintly. “I hope too.” 

She dug a set of key out of her pocket, unlocked the massive door and creeped inside. From down the front steps, Roe heard her shout “Maman, c’est moi!” A few slow steps on tiles and she appeared back in the door frame. “À bientôt.” She was smiling; Roe’s heart had never been lighter since he set a foot in boot camp.

“À bientôt,” he said. Renée’s smile turned into a silent laugh, tenderness flooded her eyes. She closed the door.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a few months old and unbeta-ed. Still, I rather like it although I seriously worry whether or not O'Brian was a good random name for the injured replacement.  
> Also, à bientôt = see you soon


End file.
